This involves a long-term research and development project in partnership with The University of East Anglia and Norfolk & Suffolk NHS as well as other research partners.

Drawing on collaboration with multiple disciplines from Psychology, Video Production, Computer Science, Electrical Engineering and Human-Computer Interface Design this project aims to investigate feasibility and effectiveness of a novel computer-based system for psychological therapy.

This research has found that people with social anxiety and learning disabilities can be helped to overcome their fears and learn appropriate social skills by viewing themselves taking part in a range of virtual scenarios.

Controlled exposure therapy sessions for social phobia and learning disabilities with patients in NHS clinics have utilised custom-designed hardware installations and over a hundred virtual environments (2-7 mins in duration) including public speaking, public transport, shops, streets, parties, bars, cafés, speed-dating, medical consultations and a job interview.

Therapeutic Outcomes

• Providing the opportunity for systematic practice and improvement of competence in social skills such as conversation or body language.

• Building self-awareness and self-assurance to enable exposure to real-life events which would normally present challenges or create anxiety.

• Questioning unproductive understanding of insecurities.

• Enabling understanding that anxiety can be perpetuated by avoidance strategies and inaccurate interpretation of events in feared scenarios.

• Demonstrating that anxiety declines when exposure to feared scenarios is practiced whilst inhibiting impulses to avoid such situations.

A range of psychological therapies and learning-related applications are currently undergoing further research and development using our systems.

For more details about clinical research please feel free to get in touch here.

Xenodu in the News

The UK national press have been reporting on our innovative virtual therapy system for social anxiety and learning disabilities, developed through new research by the University of East Anglia with the NHS (National Health Service).

Our work with NHS has also included various interactive projects to both protect and promote public health in the community and to develop the communication skills of NHS staff.

Pledge 2012 was initiative run by Active Norfolk in association with Norfolk & Suffolk NHS and used Xenodu systems to celebrate the London Olympic and Paralympic Games by inviting members of the public to participate in a county-wide legacy project.

Through the use of custom-designed Pledge 2012 Pods at events throughout Norfolk, participants were asked to make a pledge against a special Olympics-themed video background and were able to see themselves running around an athletics track or cycling around a velodrome.

Pledges ranged from simply committing to take regular exercise, to healthy eating or doing something specific such as taking up a new sport or running a half marathon.

Each pledge was then uploaded to an online interactive map of Norfolk on which participants were able to zoom in and watch their pledges and those made by others.

Our ongoing work with Surrey and Borders NHS involves the development of the UK’s only virtual patient Technology Enhanced Learning system that uses virtual humans to train medical staff how to be better communicators with patients and colleagues.

This innovative project draws on a multi-disciplinary network of expertise to promote curiosity driven learning in order to change behaviours of learners in real-word practice.

This involves the development of authentic virtual characters with believable personalities, diverse points of view, detailed back-stories, family backgrounds and medical histories, all taken from real-world scenarios.

The project aims to build empathetic practice by giving learners a licence to fail and learn from their mistakes in a safe environment through using simulated high-stakes scenarios.